She should know. Gosper is the curator and gallery manager of Fitzroy's Colour Factory, one of Melbourne's leading specialist fine art and commercial photographic printers, with a reputation as one of the city's most dynamic gallery spaces for contemporary photographic art.

While technology commentators have been heralding celluloid's demise since global digital camera sales first outgrossed their film counterparts in 2003, and Kodak ceased production of its 35-millimetre camera range the following year,the story in specialised photographic circles could not be more different.

''It's really just shifted from a mainstream application to a specialist application,'' says Gosper, who has a master's degree in photography from the Victorian College of the Arts.

''We've actually seen rises in a number of traditional techniques like cyanotype, Van Dyke and these all these old, alternative processes.''

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Since opening its doors in October last year, the Colour Factory Gallery has hosted 15 exhibitions by a range of emerging and established photographic artists, including the meticulously choreographed studio scenes of Gerard O'Connor's Blood, Sweat and Tears, the lush interiors of Jo-Anne Duggan's Wondrous Possessions and the stark, snowbound vistas of Rohan Hutchinson's large-format photographs from Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, Kamikawa Sub-Prefecture.

That 12 of those 15 exhibitions were shot on film, says Colour Factory owner and director, Phil Virgo, is no anomaly.

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''It's quite amazing that once you go to the higher level of photographic artists, the vast majority of them are film based.''

For the 49-year-old, who began shooting photographs (or as he puts it ''making pictures'') at 13 and has worked as a commercial photographer and printer for his entire career, the cultural currency of film lies not in a stagnant traditionalism, but in what the medium instils in its practitioners.

''The common practice of people who have learnt to shoot digitally is to talk about how it's fantastic because you can take hundreds of pictures and it doesn't matter if you take a bad one because you can just delete it,'' he says with a laugh. ''When you shoot with film, you can't afford to take a bad picture, so you are always improving.

''Instead of spending hours behind the computer trying to fix up a bad image you can be wandering the streets or the bush, setting up shots properly and spending that time creating a photographic image. It's a quality you recognise straight away.''

That's not to suggest that the gallery's focus is strictly technical.

Appointing Gosper, a young curator with a more conceptual bent, was a defining move, resulting in such cutting edge shows as young Melbourne artist Rhiannon King's War Porn series, which featured choreographed, stylised recastings of US military torture techniques.

''The things that are important to us are that, yes, the work is of a high technical standard, but it has to be of an equally high conceptual standard,'' Gosper says.

''Outside of the Centre for Contemporary Photography, which is a fantastic institution, there was really no dedicated space for emerging photographers who were doing fantastic work, but just weren't getting shown.

''We really wanted to fill that space in the market for photographers who sit somewhere between what we might call a 'photographer's photographer' and a fine art photographer.''

If the reaction to Colour Factory Gallery, which will begin representing artists from next year, is any indication, there's life in the celluloid art form yet.

''When we started, I was a bit nervous as to how I was going to be able to fill this space 12 times a year,'' Virgo says. ''But there are just bucketloads of incredible young photographers out there.

''Now I understand why people are so rapt to have a dedicated gallery to photographic art, because photographic art is alive and well.''

Simon Normand's The Unwritten Country shows at Colour Factory Gallery until January 28. colourfactory.com.au